Facilities and Resources
The Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama represents a large investment from the University of £6 million, and move both subject areas into facilities at the centre of the campus. As a result students can now take advantage of state-of-the-art equipment and resources. In addition, £2.2 million was invested in new electroacoustic composition studios, which opened in 2007 and are the home of theNOVARS Research Centre.
There are two major performance spaces within the Martin Harris Centre: the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall – named in recognition of Cosmo Rodewald for his considerable generosity to the university over many years – has an acoustically designed auditorium that seats an audience of up to 350 people, with a spacious stage area large enough to accommodate a full symphony orchestra; the John Thaw Studio Theatre – named in recognition of the kind support of the John Thaw Foundation – seats up to 150, and is a flexible space, mainly used for dramatic productions within the university.
360 degree views of our performance spaces. To view the John Thaw Studio Theatre click here [Adobe Flash needed] |
In addition, the building houses the John Casken Lecture Theatre, the Lenagan Library, and a wide range of teaching rooms and specialist rehearsal and practice spaces, as well as the offices of the academic staff of both the Music and the Drama departments, and the ever-important Café Arts. There are extensive practising facilities available to undergraduates and postgraduates, including rooms for individual practice and those designed for group rehearsals. They house a large number of good-quality pianos (including eleven grands), a harpsichord, chamber organ, fortepiano, square piano and a Javanese gamelan. The Music department also owns a range of orchestral instruments, and an impressive collection of early musical instruments – including a complete set of reproduction Baroque instruments, loaned to students who play in our Baroque Orchestra, Renaissance recorders, crumhorns, cornetti and a chest of viols. A suite of electronic pianos is available for harmony work and keyboard skills.
Our outstanding Electroacoustic facilities (home of NOVARS) are housed in an award-winning, iconic building designed by Cruikshank and Seward architects. They include a unique 31-channel surround studio, a dedicated studio for audio in multimedia production and composition, a studio with a 10-channel monitoring system for multi-channel compositional research, a 5.1 monitoring and composition environment for interactive art and game engine technologies, which also serves as a recording and teaching space, and a studio cluster for teaching, group and individual work. The MANTIS Festival (Manchester Theatre in Sound) and NOVARS present a 40-channel diffusion matrix system for the Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall and Studio 1, for sound spatialisation. Full details of the studio facilities are given here.
The Lenagan Library is a small reference library that includes major scores, basic reference tools and a large collection of recordings. The main holdings are in the John Rylands University Library, which offers superb resources and is the largest university library in Britain outside Oxford and Cambridge, with more than 4 million printed books and manuscripts, over 41,000 electronic journals and 500,000 electronic books, as well as several hundred databases. Special collections are housed in the John Rylands Library on Deansgate, in the city centre. These include rare books and early printed scores, and music manuscripts from every century of the past millennium. Students also have access to The Henry Watson Library, situated in Manchester's Central Library – renowned for its Handel and Vivaldi manuscripts (currently accessible via the City Library on Deansgate), and also to the nearby Royal Northern College of Music library, which contains a very good collection of music books, scores and recordings, as well as source material suitable for research.
Public & Professional Organisations (academic related)
Our Academic staff have links with public and professional organisations. A few of them are listed below.
- DSCH Multimedia CD-Rom information on Dmitri Shostakovich
- International Musicological Society, Prof David Fallows, former President
- University of Manchester Music Society - Student run music society
- Psappha the North's premiere new music ensemble based in Manchester, and the Music Department's Ensemble-in-Association
- Schott music publisher's website
- spnm - Society for the Promotion of New Music
Musical Life in Manchester
The University of Manchester is situated within easy reach of:
- Royal Northern College of Music
- BBC North (home of the BBC Philharmonic)
- Palace Theatre (Manchester's primary venue for Opera North and Glyndebourne Touring Opera)
- Bridgewater Hall (home of the Hallé Orchestra)
- Cornerhouse art-film complex of cinemas, galleries, bar and restaurant
- Nexus Cafe (Northern Quarters) for MANTIS events (meeting community)
Beyond these, Manchester's art galleries, museums, theatre companies and (by no means least) clubs give it a fair claim to having more artistic activity than any other English city outside London. The University is also only a few minutes walk from the renowned district of ethnic restaurants.